Request Time (Join The Gang) July 11, 2008

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I thought I might open up the Blog to some requests and suggestions.

Are there any particular topics you would like covered ? Is there something I might already have previously touched upon you think would be worth expanding ? Do you think I go into too much detail or too little ? Are you still annoyed I got you on April Fool’s day or are you simply hanging out to find out what my favourite top 10 movies of all time might be :)

Or maybe it’s simply just a case of more of the same please ?

There’s still a whole heap to index related topics I haven’t even touched yet however I thought it might be worth touching base with those of you who read these humble little posts regarding what might be of interest going forward.

I won’t promise to be able to meet each and every request but it’s an opportunity for you to at least get me thinking about what might be worth covering and how to best to discuss them.

Last time I did something similar, I received far more emails than blog comments and that’s fine if you prefer to make suggestions offline.

All the post by you in this blog is great. It gives me a great amount of information about index. The details that you provide help me validate the information myself which is very much appreciated. Keep up the great work.

I second the IOT and index partitioning questions (partitioned IOTs? :) ), and also if it fits your profile would like to hear a bit about Oracle clusters. Look at the 3 (technically 2) cluster types (single table hash, hash, index), pros / cons, some practical scenarios when it’s worth using them, etc.

I would like you to cover index organized tables and the nuances of costing involving operations on them, considering such things as the primary key having a zero clustering factor and what the optimizer does with table look up by rowid as there is concept of an absolute rowid in an IOTs. Although Jonathan Lewis has not cothered IOTs in his Cost Based Optimizer Fundamentals book explicitly, he does allude to special cases involving the optimizer and IOTs.